Europe, Blurred: Migration, Margins and the Museum

Abstract

More and more museums all over Europe are discovering migration as a topic for exhibitions. These exhibitions on migration question notions of objectivity or of European universalism. This article looks at a broad range of recent exhibitions and museums that address the topic of migration. Taking into consideration their varying scope and institutional context, this text argues that exhibitions on migration tell several stories at once: Firstly, they present stories of migration in a certain city, region or nation, and within a particular period of time. For this purpose, curators make extensive use of maps -with the peculiar effect that these maps blur what seems to be the clear-cut entity of reference of the museum itself or the exhibition. To a stronger degree than other phenomena that turn into museal topics, 'migration' unveils the constructed character of geographic or political entities such as the nation or the European Union. It shows how, hidden below the norm of settledness, mobilities are and have always been omnipresent in and fundamental for European societies. Secondly and related to this, exhibitions on migration add a new chapter to the meta-narrative of museums: implicitly, they challenge the relevance of the nation -specifically, of both the historical idea that initiated the invention of the public museum (cf. e.g. Bennett 1999) and the political fundament of European integration today. They provoke questions of settledness, citizenship, or contemporary globalisation phenomena that are equally implicitly put on display. The consequent effect is a blurring of the concept of the nationstate. Finally, migration as a museal topic conveys a view on how the institution of the 'museum' relates to such a fuzzy thing as mobility, thus provoking questions for further research.

Exhibiting Solidarity Work: Temporary Displays and Their Potential To Trouble and Push Museums Representing European Mobilities

“…I hold that especially exhibitions devoted to migration issues have an outstanding potential to challenge museums' practices within virtually all core areas, from the manner in which they deal with collections, to the way they address the public, to aesthetic issues (Whitehead et al 2015;Cimoli 2013;CAMOC 2017). Migration as a social process and political reality has the potential to change the ways in which Europe and its borders, European regions, and cities are being represented and their stories 'told' (Poehls 2010(Poehls , 2011, see also Innocenti 2014, Lanz 2016, von Bose et al 2011.…”

Staging Migration (in) Museums: A Reflection on Exhibition Design Practices for the Representation of Migration in European Contemporary Museums

“…Nevertheless, they also have some drawbacks. As different authors have already pointed out, the overuse of iconic objects like passports and luggage is transforming them from precious multilayered communication tools, into stale, prosaic clichés (Poehls 2011). Another risk, no less problematic, is lurking in the extensive use of full-scale reconstructions: they may in fact result in too literal transpositions, leaving little to the visitor's imagination and limiting personal interpretations, thus eventually flattening and homogenizing the visit experience.…”

“…The reassessment of the scope, role and nature of objects in exhibitions devoted to migration is a central issue upon which several studies are being recently focused as well as different curatorial experimentations. On this issue see Poehls 2011;Whitehead et al 2014. 6 The exhibition was mainly funded by the European Union and promoted by the Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in collaboration with other eight museum partners.…”

European Heritage, Dialogue and Digital Practices

“…This chapter investigates these issues specifically in the context of the European Union (EU), where dialogue is often mobilised -for example, by policy makers as discussed by Galani et al . in Chapter 2 of this volume -as a means to negotiating diverse narratives related to the notion of 'encountering the other'. The first of these narratives relates to the supranational character of the EU; in this context, the history of Europe, from its ancient origins to the present, is frequently framed as a history of cross-border mobility, migration and multiculturalism to promote a communitarian sense of belonging ( Jensen and Richardson, 2004 ;Poehls, 2011 ). This affirms a transnational identity that incorporates all European countries and provides historical context for discussing the contemporary politics of integration aimed at accommodating the current influx of migrants and refugees.…”